Manderly already appeared last season, and I can't see Broadbent as Reed- he doesn't look much like young Howland as last season, and he's not the tiny man that the books often describe crannogmen as. I'm thinking he'll be a fairly bit part like Ian McShane had.

"On @MeetThePress, @hughhewitt says Pence is doing good job of defending Trump -- compares it to Davos Seaworth defending Stannis Baratheon" Hewitt seems to have conveniently forgotten who put an end to Stannis.

More or less agree with the table-setting critique, though as you note there's so many characters still in play that it's good to be reminded/shown where everyone is and what their relation is to the main drivers of the plot. Didn't help that they (necessarily) led with the most satisfying moment:

SpoilerShow

Arya's annihilation of the Freys. It's amazing that an episode I saw four years ago and haven't rewatched since instilled such a visceral, lasting hatred for a fictional family that I found their mass poisoning deeply satisfying.

Anyone else getting the impression that all of the characters we like are just going to come together and shut down the characters we don’t like and that’ll be all she wrote? It’s hard to end a complicated and sprawling series like this, but when some really shocking stuff occurred on this show/in those books, I expected more from the way it ended. I hope I’m wrong.

I thought it was a decent filler episode moving our players into place but I do have some minor critical observations which have mostly been pointed out so far. I fear it is finally because there really is no more text for them to rely on.

1. Editing. I felt this episode was so awkward in how it handled its time. Season 1-6 (regular episodes; not event episodes like Battle of the Bastards) seemed to give a scene or sequence a few minutes and then move on, even if it was to the other side of the world. Then it would return. This episode felt fragmented and segregated like the Wikipedia description of episodes (for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbowed,_Unbent,_Unbroken" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;). I felt instead of crosscutting, every story was told in whole for 10 minutes like this was an anthology collection of short films and to be honest it slowed down the episode for me. I just felt it was jarring.

2. Dialogue. This one is tougher and I suspect that this is all subconciously in my mind but the dialogue seemed off. I know they are out of text to rely on, but it felt at times the writers were doing their best to imitate Martin's style. Sometimes it worked, like the exchange with the Hound:

why are you so miserable?
experience

That was fantastic, but there just seemed to be something missing at times in the casual dialogue. Martin should just be a script supervisor.

Overall, I thought it was good. The cold open with Arya and the Frey's was incredible.

These kinds of episodes are often my favorite, they catch a lot of hell for not having season finale oomph, but I really like the way that Arya's story was handled, for example. Rather than just being a rehash of the season six finale, this scene definitively wraps up the Frey / river lands storyline, shows how ruthless arya has become as she graduates to mass murder, but most importantly, we have a dramatic counterpoint within the episode showing that arya in spite of her experience still has some small shreds of humanity in her, rather than just murdering all the Lannister men. I think the episode is clearly setting up the season finale where arya kills Jaime, takes his face and then strangles cersei as Jaime . I hope she's successful, because she's also gone down such a villainous path that I don't expect her to survive the series.

I also liked how the pair of cersei scenes played out, showing her ability to listen to Jaime and refuse Eurons proposal, which she may not have done otherwise, instead opting to greedily seize the power euron offered. I also like the idea that the show is going to show us some of eurons acquisition of the valarian dragon horn, rather than just lazily have it appear in a powerful opposition faction as Martin does.

Jon and Sansa was pretty interesting, Jon declares he's not taking any ancestral homes from any children. EXCEPT HE TOOK WINTERFELL FROM SANSA! I love the look on Sansas face, the barely controlled rage at jons hypocrisy, it again made me think that Sansa will wind up murdering Jon.

I don't think Arya's surviving either and I don't think she's getting Cersei. My money's on her getting close to Cersei and going for it only to find its Jaquen Hagar and he's finally gotten up the gumption to kill her. She's wildly misusing what she learned.